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I Bought 64 CPU Cores From eBay For $400…

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This was a complete waste of more than a week of my life.

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45 Comments

  1. Thanks for all the suggestions about the torque on the socket. The seller didn’t send me a torque wrench with my purchase. It is eBay after all. 😂 I do think I accidentally got the pressure right for the final mount considering that I got it to power up. However I will get an appropriate torque wrench for the follow up video.

  2. When you buy used non-pin CPUs and RAM you always should clean their contacts with eraser rubber and ethanol. They always get an invisible film of rust/oxidation which acts as insulator.

  11. honestly, ebay or aliexpress for cheap recc ram…those dont need high speed ram,the are im betting 2333 or 2666 at highest.. and recc ram in those caps is stupidly cheap because it only works in servers and some ryzen systems… not all just some… even though amd leave recc support enabled on desktop board makers often refuse to for consumer grade boards.. :/

    and i love old server and HEDT stuff 🙂

  13. I actually bought the same board (H11DSi-NT) from them (but with two EPYC 7302 instead). I had 8 64GB ECC RDIMM populating all DIMMs for CPU 1 and it booted up as expected. I think you should be able to diagnose exactly what went wrong by going into the IPMI management page as the LED to the left of the board is blinking green, so the board has started up successfully. The user name and password are printed on the board (the sticker to the right under CPU2 DIMMS). Also, consult the manual and see which DIMM slot for CPU1 needs to be populated in order for the board to boot and torque the CPUs up to spec, I heard the board is really picky about these as well. Hope this helps!

  15. Well color me suprised.. You bought the same stuff I did a little while back. I also needed a Ryzen Threadripper wrench. I have 2x be quiet dark rock pro 4 tr4 instead of the coolers you have. Also you need ECC memory with this board. I also had the same issues you did when starting this monster. Though my 7551's where cheaper than yours 😉

  18. It's funny to see somebody who's never seen server hardware look at the special ports or features that usually don't find their way into the consumer space. I'm pretty sure that one of those RJ-45 ports is for ipmi since this is a server board. Also be aware that the mounting pressure for those chips is rather precise. They usually come with a special key that only allows you to tighten it as much as it is required.

  20. Buying ecc ram is cheaper if you buy a server that already has a shit ton of ram in it and the selling or chucking the server. I got 256gb for 50$ plus the server put my old 64gb from my hp z820 in the server and sold the server for 100$ 😂

  22. In those types of motherboards, I believe you have to run dual CPUs or install a continuity module for the "empty" CPU socket. it does sound like one of the CPUs was dead though if you weren't getting any power with just one, or possibly one of the sockets on the board is bad.

  25. You might want to DISCONNECT any power BEFORE plugging/unplugging your graphics card. Those little green lights on your motherboard will tell you when there's no more juice running through your mobo. That's one of the reasons they're there.

  28. I have a similar problem with a Supermicro Xeon Server board, the problem was its size, it is a EEATX, yes it is well writen, the problem was the board is so huge that only can be fitted in some cases, I adatped a Coolermaster Cosmos 1000 and the top with a zip tie, after check it is not bended it turns on ok, so the cardboard box used at the begining to test is not ideal, you need to check those boards are not bended even a little, so it can be turned on

  29. I'm assuming the microSD card slot is for a bootdrive, running ESXi/VSphere on a USB stick is/used to be pretty common because of how little space it needs

  38. $400 for such hardware could be a clue as to why it didn't work, and they aren't called Ryzen Epyc. And how do you know it wouldn't run? How long did you wait for it to boot? They don't have any beeps. You need to use the IPMI.

  39. You did all kinds of shit here. Is the board dead in some places? I see the LED coming on and the fans did work for a few seconds, so it's obviously not completely busted. I'm fine with building a PC for someone or myself but this looks very foreign in comparison. It's interesting but not something I would be confident messing around with.

  42. Hopefully you manage to get this working at some point in the future – and I was really surprised with the 16 RAM sticks, and even more surprised that you bought 256GB RAM for this system!
    I always say that you can never have too much of RAM, so 256GB would be perfect for me! I might have to one day look for something like this… 😀

  44. Looks like a small server motherboard? I have a ML350P Proliant and the internals are arranged like this but what you have is a lot smaller and newer I think. The SD card slot is the thing that really gives it away because it means it's looking to boot from SD, so a hypervisor OS would go in that and then into the motherboard. Not an expert though so take that with a grain of salt. Would also explain the great pains taken to package it properly because normal consumers don't go for this stuff. You should be able to split the cores and the ram up to serve a ton of individual server VMs.